Cesifo Working Paper No. 5799 Category 2: Public Choice March 2016
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Migrating Extremists Christian Ochsner Felix Roesel CESIFO WORKING PAPER NO. 5799 CATEGORY 2: PUBLIC CHOICE MARCH 2016 An electronic version of the paper may be downloaded • from the SSRN website: www.SSRN.com • from the RePEc website: www.RePEc.org • from the CESifo website: www.CESifoT -group.org/wpT ISSN 2364-1428 CESifo Working Paper No. 5799 Migrating Extremists Abstract We show that migrating extremists shape political landscapes toward their ideology in the long run. We exploit the unexpected division of the state of Upper Austria into a US and a Soviet occupation zone after WWII. Zoning prompts large-scale Nazi migration to US occupied regions. Regions that witnessed a Nazi influx exhibit significantly higher voting shares for the right-wing Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) throughout the entire post-WWII period, but not before WWII. We can exclude other channels that may have affected post-war elections, including differences in US and Soviet denazification and occupation policies, bomb attacks, Volksdeutsche refugees and suppression by other political parties. We show that extremism is transmitted through family ties and local party branches. We find that the surnames of FPÖ local election candidates in 2015 in the former US zone are more prevalent in 1942 phonebook data (Reichstelefonbuch) of the former Soviet zone compared to other parties. JEL-Codes: R230, D720, N440, Z130. Keywords: political economy, migration, extremism, voting, geonomastics, Austria. Christian Ochsner Felix Roesel Ifo Institute – Leibniz Institute for Ifo Institute – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research Economic Research at the University of Munich at the University of Munich Dresden Branch Dresden Branch Einsteinstrasse 3 Einsteinstrasse 3 Germany – 01069 Dresden Germany – 01069 Dresden [email protected] [email protected] This version: February 25, 2016 1. Introduction Can an influx of political extremism shape a region in the long run? We show that Nazi migration in the aftermath of WWII still impacts right-wing voting in Austria. In doing so, we contribute to the recent literature that convincingly links past events and institutions to present socio-economic spatial patterns. The historical roots of present economic figures are well documented in Acemoglu et al. (2011), Dell (2010), Glaeser and Shleifer (2002), Hall and Jones (1999) or Hornbeck and Naidu (2014). Other studies examine how historical events affect cultural norms (Putnam 1993, Tabellini 2008 and 2010; for a gen- eral discussion see Spolaore and Wacziarg 2013). In developing countries, the missionary activities (Caicedo 2014, Nunn 2010), colonialization (Acemoglu et al. 2001) and slave trade (Nunn 2008, Nunn and Wantchekon 2011) of the past shape current cultural norms and attitudes toward trust. In Europe, current values, beliefs and attitudes toward trust and corruption have been shown to rely on events or institutions from decades or even centuries ago, e.g., medieval pogroms (Voigtländer and Voth 2012), the long-gone Habsburg Empire (Becker et al. 2016), Italian city states (Guiso et al. 2013), the Holocaust (Grosfeld et al. 2013) or the division and reunification of Germany (Alesina and Fuchs-Schündeln 2007, Brosig-Koch et al. 2011, Ockenfels and Weimann 1999). In this paper, we show that Austrian regions that witnessed a Nazi influx after WWII exhibit signifi- cantly higher right-wing voting shares throughout the entire post-WWII period. We exploit the quasi- random assignment of occupation zones in the Austrian state of Upper Austria after WWII. Most parts of Upper Austria were initially liberated by US troops in May 1945. Military considerations on the part of the Soviet Union, however, allocated US liberated regions in Northern Upper Austria to a Soviet occupation zone. Figure 1 shows Upper Austria within the realized occupation zones in Austria from August 1945 to 1955. After rumors of this occupation re-assignment began to circulate, people fled the arrival of the Red Army for the US zone in the South (Leimlehner 1974). The US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) reported the mass exodus in the following way: “On 2 July 1945 a rumor circulated in Linz that the Russians were to take over the area north of the Danube. That night people started crossing the Linz bridge into what was believed would be the future American zone. […] One MP officer estimates that 25,000 persons crossed over, but informant claims that 4,000– 5,000 is a more accurate figure. Informant estimates that another 4,000–5,000 crossed on July 4. […] Two informants who made a trip to the area north of the Danube report that what appears to be a general exodus is in progress.”1 1 Cited after Beer (1991, pp. 206-207). 2 Historians, political scientists and contemporaneous newspaper articles, however, indicate that primarily former Nazis migrate across the intra-Upper Austrian zone border (e.g., Hindinger 1968, Schuster 2004, Slapnicka 1986, Stiefel 1981; see also Section 3.2, and Table 9 in the Appendix). For example, Leimlehner (1974) states: “[…] Nazis in particular feared being punished more severely by the Russians and took their belongings to southern Upper Austria.”2 The selection of the US zone by Nazi refugees yields a region characterized by a low density of Nazis (Soviet zone) and a region characterized by a high density of Nazis (US zone) within an otherwise historically, culturally, politically and economically homogeneous region. We investigate whether mi- grating Nazis changed right-wing voting in national elections. The high level of continuity in Austria’s right-wing camp (Ignazi 2003, Luther 1997, Staeuber 1974) allows us to compare pre-WWII voting results to post-war elections. Upper Austria thus provides a unique setting to study the long-run impact of migrating extremists. We apply a spatial regression discontinuity (RD) approach to identify regional differences in right-wing votes in national elections. We use the exogenously drawn zone border between US and Soviet occupied municipalities as the discontinuity threshold in our RD specification. Voting shares for the right-wing Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) 3 appear to be well suited as an indicator for extreme political attitudes because the post-war FPÖ is influenced by a strong faction of neo-fascist and neo-Nazi persuasion (Ig- nazi 2003, Luther 2000, Pelinka 2002, Staeuber 1974). Our RD results indicate a permanent and highly significant shift in right-wing voting in the former US zone after WWII. Seventy years after the Nazi influx and sixty years after the abolishment of the occupation zones, voting shares for right-wing parties at the threshold are still 37% higher in the former US zone compared to the former Soviet zone. By contrast, right-wing voting varies smoothly along the temporary zone border prior to WWII. Further- more, we do not find geographical discontinuities for the other two main political parties in Austria, the social-democratic SPÖ and the conservative ÖVP, across the temporary zone border. Therefore, voting shares for moderate parties remain unaffected by migration and differ only slightly for nearly a century. 2 Translation by the authors. The original text (in German language) is as follows: “ Insbesondere Nationalsozia- listen fürchteten eine Bestrafung durch die Russen weit mehr und begaben sich mit ihrer Habe ins südliche Oberös- terreich “ (Leimlehner 1974, p. 69). 3 Within this paper, FPÖ (Freiheitliche Partei Österreich) denotes the entire right-wing camp in Austria since 1919. Right-wing parties in Austria include the following: Deutschnationale parties (before WWII), Verband der Un- abhängigen (VdU), Bündnis Zukunft Österreich (BZÖ) and the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) (after WWII). See Section 2 or the Appendix for a detailed description. 3 These results are robust for different RD polynomials, different regional subsamples and pseudo-border assignments. We can exclude channels other than the Nazi influx that may have affected post-war elections. We find no explanatory power of Volksdeutsche refugees and expellees, Allied bombings during WWII, or tac- tical considerations of other parties. Furthermore, potential differences in the enforcement of denazifi- cation policies by the respective occupation force have no influence on the variation in FPÖ voting shares across the temporary zone border. Finally, we can exclude differences in the occupation policy of the Allies as an additional source of variation in right-wing votes. To reach this conclusion, we used a panel of data from US and Soviet occupied districts in Austria’s capital of Vienna. FIGURE 1. ALLIED OCCUPATION OF POST -WWII AUSTRIA , 1945–1955 Czech Republic Upper Austria Slovakia Germany Hungary Liechtenstein Switzerland Italy Slovenia Croatia Soviet Union US UK France Notes : This figure shows Austria and the four occupation zones from 1945 to 1955. The state of Upper Austria is highlighted with the boldest dark line. Black lines indicate state borders. Thin lines within Upper Austria depict municipal borders. The white areas within Austria indicate municipalities which were divided among the Allies. These are Austria’s capital city Vienna, Upper Austria’s capital city Linz and two small municipalities in the southwest of Upper Austria (Maria Neustift, Gaflenz). Maps of occupation plan proposals and the initial demar- cation line at the end of WWII are provided in Figure 5 for Austria, and the municipal level for Upper Austria is shown in Figure 6. We present evidence for two channels to explain persistent differences in right-wing votes across the former zone border. First, we corroborate previous findings that right-wing attitudes are inherited within families over generations (Avdeenko and Siedler 2016, Dohmen et al. 2012, Necker and Voskort 2014). We rely on geonomastics as a novel approach to trace back current right-wing affiliation to past migra- tion patterns. We compare more than 17,000 candidates’ surnames from municipal council elections in 4 Upper Austria in September 2015 with the pre-war spatial distribution of surnames based on phonebook entries from 1942 ( Reichstelefonbuch ).